Adobe ImageReady

Let's take a look at some details on what you can do with ImageReady. The software was designed to be a bitmap graphics editor, to help you ready your pictures and graphics for the web. Like I said above, if you've ever bought or downloaded a trial version of Photoshop, then you have ImageReady too. Which, to me, makes Photoshop a pretty decent deal. ImageReady is like a lite version of Photoshop, a lot of the same features are on both. Some of the filters and drawing tools and such are on ImageReady, but here's what you can do with ImageReady that you can't on Photoshop:

Animated .GIF Creation - Let's you animate GIF pictures that move on their own. Kind of like those AIM buddy icons or pictures like I went over in the banners section. The animation palette makes it quick and easy to create such graphics.

Image Compression Optimization - This is handy when putting images on your website. What this does is cut down on extra colors being used over and over and in turn makes your image file size smaller. What that means to you is that your image will load quicker and take up less space.

Rollover Effects - These are those pictures that change when you put your mouse pointer over top of them. I'm sure you've seen them and not even noticed that's what they were. They're one image if you're looking at it normally and then when you put your mouse over them they change to a different image. You can use ImageReady to make these as you go.

Rollover Effects Preview - ImageReady has two buttons for this. One will let you view your rollover effects right in ImageReady instead of having it open a browser window. And the other buttons lets you view your rollover effects in a browser window.

Multiple Screen Modes - There's the standard screen, full screen mode with a menu bar and then just normal full screen mode.

I've found ImageReady to be really handy in helping me make my banner ads and any other GIF animation ideas I've come up with out of boredom. Like this one, me doing a front handspring off my trampoline:

Yeah yeah, I know it's not great quality but I had to set my camera in the grass, set the timer and then time my handspring at the right time, so oh well. I like it. I haven't tried to use the rollover effects yet though. There's a handy button on the bottom of the main toolbar, it's on Photoshop too but in reverse, when you click it, it'll take the picture you have open and open it in Photoshop. This can save you a couple steps. Want some help learning how to use ImageReady? Here, let me help you help yourself:

Those sites should help you out a lot. You'll probably know more about ImageReady than I do in no time. ImageReady will work on both Windows and Mac operating systems. So whatever you decide to use as your web graphic editing software, I'd hope it'd be Adobe. They're on the top of the image creation/editing software market in my mind.

    Did you ever see those pictures on websites, when you move your mouse pointer over top of them, the picture changes? Or have you seen those animated pictures or banners? Did you ever wonder how to make them yourself? You didn't? Ok, bye. Haha alright, well I'm sure you did or you wouldn't be on this page. You can do all that and more with Adobe ImageReady. Now you may not have heard about ImageReady, but I'm sure you've heard about her big brother; Adobe Photoshop. And you're in luck, if you buy Photoshop, ImageReady comes with it with no extra charge.
    I like to edit pictures in Photoshop and then open up ImageReady to add animation or other handy things dealing with web graphics. Adobe is top of the line in my mind when it comes to image manipulation. So if you want your website looking steps above the rest, you might as well use the best software out there to create it.